Independent software developer Orchard Software Corporation of Carmel, Indiana, was founded in 1993. Their Orchard Harvest product suite is a group of client/server and web-based components designed to eliminate paper, reduce errors, speed delivery of results, and electronically integrate laboratories both internally and with their external clients like doctors offices.
Hundreds of laboratories across the United States have turned to Orchard Software for their laboratory information system ranging from hospitals, specialty clinics, physician office labs and student health centers, to public health organizations, and the software is a recognized leader in its field.
One of the issues that Orchard's customers were facing was a need to be able to review not just text-based reports, but also other types of media from the client/server version of their product. To solve this problem, Orchard turned to 4D Live Window, part of 4D Web 2.0 Pack.
"Pathology reports have become more complex over time. Where once they might have been a simple text output, today, they are likely to include images obtained from microscopes, electronic signatures, and may contain a variety of colors and fonts," explains Jeffrey Kain, Executive Vice President and cofounder of Orchard Software Corporation.
"Our application needed to grow along with those reports. 4D Live Window's ability to add multimedia to a 4D Client integrated very seamlessly and easily into our application, which gave doctors the improved user interface they needed. It was easy for us to do, made our customers happy, and improved patient care. Everybody benefited."
With a successful 4D Live Window project completed, Kain started looking at other ways 4D Live Window could improve the user experience. "Up to now, we have sold a traditional client/server application and a web-based application as separate solutions," Kain reports. "Having to support two applications with different feature sets took up time we could have spent on developing more product features."
Instead, Orchard looked at how they could unify both products by implementing 4D Live Window's interactive browser capabilities in the client product, allowing it to replicate features that had previously only been available in the web-based version of the product.
"Not only is a single solution easier for our customers to manage and configure, it lets us offer a single product that is more powerful than the sum of its parts. 4D Live Window lets us blur the line between a web application and a classic desktop application, giving our users the best of both worlds," Kain concludes. "We constantly strive to provide the best possible customer support, as well as make complex software that is simple to use and that improves the efficiency and accuracy of laboratory information. 4D Live Window is helping us do all of that, and we're thrilled with the results."
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